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I don't think you know enough about Bitcoin, and I encourage you to read more about it. While it is hugely volatile, and even more hugely risky - not to say stupid - to "invest" in, I think many of your criticisms are invalid.

Bitcoin is absolutely traceable - it's far more traceable than cash. Read up about how the blockchain works (and see the Zerocoin proposal to see how it could be made untraceable, optionally, in the future). (The only non-traceable coins are those minted by miners with very paranoid security arrangements).

Cornering a "significant supply of coins" would take a significant investment of "real world" cash to actually corner these coins - not a trivial thing to get your hands on. So I don't think this is a large risk for the current Bitcoin ecosystem.

Also, you suggest that with regard to an entity trying to coopt or alter Bitcoin, "there's absolutely nothing you can do about that as a user of bitcoin". That's not true - simply running the reference software implementation makes you a node in the network, thus enforcing your (i.e. the default software's) set of rules on the transactions you do/do not relay. And additionally, the computing power deployed by today's miners would probably be impossible to exceed except by a very determined and well financed attacker. How much would a government spend to attack Bitcoin?

And if the "creators" (by which I suppose you mean the current set of core devs) try to create a new blockchain, good luck to them - the blockchain is far more resilient and the network runs as a democracy. It wouldn't work unless a vast amount of users also followed.

Your point about exchanges is key of course - they are extremely amateur operations right now. But that's easily changeable by hard work.

Digital cash ought to excite any geek - whether Bitcoin is "it", or simply an alpha version of something better yet to arrive, who knows.